Author's note: Well, I'll say something about the rest of this story before it's all posted. There are a lot of anecdotes told by Horatio that are simply for flavor and nothing else. There is no resolution, he is simply telling of his past and reasons for some of the present happenings. The man has been through a great deal, and it's a miracle that he's even survived this long. In this case, it's a good thing he has Murdok along, because there are some things a mere mortal simply has no chance against...
A Friend in Need
At first, it didn't seem odd that Horatio wasn't around. After all, he had gone looking about while I slept before, so why not now? I waited for an hour or so, then decided I should go look for him. I called to him, but never received an answer, and so I searched for a long time. After 3 fruitless hours of this, I gave up and went back to where we had been camped, hoping against hope that he would be there waiting for me. Instead, what I found was a ransacked campsite and a note, scrawled in broken English. It read thus:
We take man in armor. He kill one of us long time ago. Him pay now. You no try find, or you pay too. Him scream and beg for die when we do bad things to him. If you smart you leave us alone now. We no want trouble, only want make bad man pay.
Needless to say, this only angered and worried me. I ripped it to shreds and stalked away after "them", easily tracking the thing by the prints it left in the soil, which was very soft. They were rather large tracks, each one at least doubling the size of my foot and being a different shape each time. None of them resembled anything, but were simply there. No matter what the threat, I was not afraid. After all, I had been through enough kinds of hell already. I figured I could stand another. Besides, this man had been very kind to me, and I was not going to let some half-wit monstrosities take his life from him.
I followed the trail of the creature for a long, long time, and dawn was soon approaching. I had a mere 2 hours more to search, then I would lose an entire day on them. I would have been flying, but we were in a thickly wooded area, and following a trail that way would have been impossible. I began to think it odd that I didn't see more sets of tracks. After all, hadn't the note referred to a group? Perhaps only one had been needed to fetch Horatio, but him being such a formidable man, I doubted that seriously. My doubts, however, would soon be erased, because I was coming up on a small clearing, and what I saw froze me in my tracks.
Standing nearby was a creature roughly fifteen feet tall, and it was so hideously misshapen that I couldn't even tell which was its back or front. It had hands and feet, or some semblance thereof, and the whole thing seemed to be made of flesh and very little bone. Horatio was in its clutches, and the thing was speaking to him in its broken English, but I could scarcely understand its garbled voice. It had no eyes, or really even a face for that matter. No mouth, no nose, no other features whatsoever. As I watched, another arm jutted forth from it and wrapped around my friend, beginning to squeeze him more and more, until he began to scream.
I took action, leaping into the air and taking flight for the first time in a long while, and the thing immediately grew to three times its size, nearly engulfing me when it did, for the action was so sudden I would not have thought it possible. Horatio saw me then, and he yelled for me to help him, though I wasn't exactly sure how: the creature was huge, and since it kept changing shape, I had no idea where its weak points were, if it indeed had any. Nevertheless, in a desperate effort to help my friend, I flew into it as fast as I could, hoping to knock Horatio from its grasp.
Hitting the thing was such a disgusting sensation that I can scarcely describe it, except to liken it to charging through a mass of gelatinous lard that smelled like a hundred corpses in a mass grave left lying out in a pouring rain, then left out in the sun for a few days…and that really isn't quite bad enough, to be plainly honest. I flew right through the mass of flesh, coming out on the other side covered in a blackish-green substance that stuck to me like a horrid glue. Suddenly, I realized I could hardly move, and that the stuff was hardening. I struggled with it, all the while hearing Horatio screaming in agony and trying to tell me something that I couldn't decipher in my desperation to break free. After a few hard seconds that seemed eternal, the gluey stuff hardened enough so that I shattered it from my body, then tried to listen to my friend.
"EYE! ON ITS FOOT! BREAK IT BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE," he screamed, and surely, as I looked, I saw what he spoke of: a two-inch glaring eye almost obscured by the flesh of the monster's foot. It was black, and as I saw it, it receded into the creature. I took heart and lunged, reaching into that horrible, stinking abomination and finding its eye, which was, even after a mere half second, over three feet inside it. I grasped it and tore it free, and the monster gave a garbled roar of pain as the eye burst in my hand. The thing fell to the ground in a heap, or if you prefer a more accurate description, a blob. Horatio fell beside it and passed out.
A half hour or so later, after the horrid beast's body had evaporated into a thick yellow mist which hung around stubbornly, Horatio woke up. He looked at me and managed a weak smile, then fell back into a deep sleep, into which I followed him as the dawn approached.
Another Story
When I awoke the following evening, the mist had finally cleared, and Horatio was sitting on a nearby rock, looking up at the rising moon. He turned around as he heard me come forth from my resting place, and he looked quite lively now after but a day's rest. His voice showed no weakness when he spoke.
"Murdok, my dear friend, I am terribly sorry to have brought you into such a conflict. This was an old, old quarrel that should have been settled years ago. The creature you saw was not merely one creature, but many gathered into one mass. The smaller ones were much easier to manage, though at the time I met up with them I was a great deal weaker than I am today. They came across me in a dark forest over thirty years ago, and they sought to devour me. I can't describe their appearance, because they were much like this one: no actual shape, just a mass of moving flesh with rudimentary intelligence. Where they came from, I do not know, nor do I wish to know, for the place harboring such things and the manner of their creation would surely be unbearable.
"I fought with them when they attacked me, and by a lucky strike I did kill one. It was apparent that they planned to avenge it, for as I ran, they heaved threats at me in that strange language they natively speak, though after this long and after traveling this far, I honestly thought I was safe from them. Their memory is obviously much better than mine, for I had all but forgotten the incident. I wonder if that was the last of them, or if there are more lurking about, waiting for the opportunity to take me once again. If so, they will be swift and waste no time in ending my existence. Thank you, my friend, for saving me. If you ever owed me a debt, or ever do, consider it paid in full."
We once again took shelter in the same area, regardless of our recent attack. We weren't about to let an old grudge change our plans in the least. Our journey was about to be given a violent shove into overdrive, however.
Apocalypse
To shorten the next month or so into a few lines, let us just say that we trudged through the wilderness during that time, performing the usual tasks day by day, and all the while I noticed a decrease in ground cover of any sort. Dirt and rock were the prevalent forms of terrain. Once in awhile we heard unearthly roars and screeches from far off, and Horatio informed me gravely that these were the sounds of the creatures that had taken our world from us. Other sorts of life were becoming scarce around us, and it became very difficult for me to find anything upon which to feed. I worried that we may run out of food altogether, and that would force me to feed on my only friend, because no control can be exercised over a vampire's bloodlust in full swing.
It was about this time that the most terrible spectacle of my existence took place. There was a deafening roar, and a sound of cracking and rumbling that seemed to be nothing less than the very fabric of reality being torn asunder. The skies grew orange and blazed with fires, the likes of which the world had never seen, and parts of the landscape that had once been level began to ripple and quake as a sea in the grips of a typhoon would have done. The waves froze in place at their peaks, forming new mountain ranges of jagged peaks with barbs of stone protruding from every angle. Horatio and I were thrown from our feet, and I was driven into a state of utterly maddening fear by the flames in the sky, burrowing into the ground. After this, I remember nothing for quite some time.
I awoke later to muffled sounds of crying, and I came up to see what was going on. The sky had grown black, and the landscape was unrecognizable. Everywhere there were sharp rocks, and far away I saw eruptions of magma and flames. My attention, however, was soon drawn to the shape of a man hunkered over by a nearby fallen tree, and I found to my dismay that it was Horatio, weeping tiredly but apparently unable to stop.
Seeing my friend cry was upsetting, but as a vampire, I lack the ability to shed tears. I went to him and sat down beside him, inquiring what had made him so sad. He looked up at me with a weary face and eyes so bloodshot that they seemed altogether red. When he spoke, he scarcely had a voice.
"Murdok, I…the city…all those people…," he broke off into a fit of crying and was unable to continue, and I stayed with him, providing what little comfort a stone beast can muster.
The Shattered City
I grew very tired after some time, though I could no longer discern day from night, for the sky was black with an unnatural darkness. I thought it to be smoke, or simply clouds, but upon further observation I found that it was neither. I dared not fly up to discern what exactly it was, because any long conjecture upon the subject filled me with dread. I resolved to ignore it as best I could, and count it as a bit of a blessing for my kind.
Troubled by thoughts of the recent upheaval, I still managed to sleep, most likely because my sleep is not at all natural. Horatio did not awaken until a few hours after I had risen again, and yet after so much sleep, he still looked exhausted. I asked him if he was feeling any better, and he gave a weak nod.
"I just can't stop thinking about Erebus," he said, "Surely it was destroyed in all that mayhem, and it was supposed to be my job to protect it. I had no power to prevent such a catastrophe, but nonetheless, I feel responsible on some level. I should have at least been there with them. I don't deserve to live any longer. I…I failed them. All of them…"
"My friend, you can't blame yourself for what happened. Neither of us knows what force is behind this, but we are most obviously dwarfed by it. Besides, who can say for sure that the city is fully destroyed, or that everyone in it has died? It is still some distance from us, and may yet be partially intact, and hold survivors. The people you spoke of must be of a very resilient nature, and therefore perfectly capable of lasting through all but the most desperate conditions. You shouldn't give up on them. We should instead make haste to the city and see what we can find there. If there is one thing I've learned in all my centuries, it is that there is always hope. Come!"
He seemed to brighten just the slightest bit after I said all of this, and with a great effort, he rose to his feet. "Murdok," he said, "take us to Erebus while there may still be time. It should be a matter of hours before we arrive."
I carried him up with me, and the view from above was even more depressing. The entire landscape was unrecognizable. Everywhere the ground smoldered and belched noxious vapors, and in some places new volcanoes had formed, violently erupting almost constantly. It was as if a great hand had seized the world and crushed it until it almost burst from the pressure. Tremors rocked the land, and whole mountains were being tumbled into chasms that were miles in width. It seemed that the destruction was far from over. The planet had been thrown into a violent reverse, and I was sure that it would be no more in just a short time.
We flew over such wastes for several hours, all the while haunted by the sinister darkness above us. I ventured a look at it directly above us only once out of curiosity, and to my horror I saw that it was rippling and writhing as if it were alive, and when we passed under it, giant tendrils reached out from it as if to grab hold and take us into it. It was sluggish, and could not seize us, but I dared not look upon it again for fear of madness.
Given my superior sense of vision, it was I who first spotted the smoldering ruins of a great city. I pointed them out to Horatio, and he fell to crying again, proving to me that this was indeed his home of Erebus. I decided it might be better to inspect the scene at a closer vantage point, and so, taking care to place my friend gently on the rocky ground, I landed. We were at the remains of what was once a titanic wall, and the area was littered with all manner of stone and twisted metal. Horatio looked at me and, wiping the tears from his eyes, said "I am glad not to have to do this alone, my friend." With that, we trudged into the ruins, hoping against hope that there were survivors.
It was a nightmare. Horatio was forced to stop many times to weep, and sometimes to be sick due to the bodies and pieces thereof strewn about the landscape. We visited the sites of homes of people he had known, only to find a new crag or a magma-filled crater in their place. It was as we had feared: the last great city, Erebus, had been utterly destroyed. Any live people we saw were so badly injured that there was no hope of helping them, and some died even as we observed. I had no words to comfort my friend. The remnants of mankind, it seemed, had been all but obliterated. Scattered communities may still have been around somewhere, but it would be a long, long time before there were any more cities, if ever.
We spent a few hours searching places where Horatio knew that survivors would have gathered, but we found only more corpses. Whatever had caused this catastrophe, it had done its work well. No edifice had been left standing. Once in awhile, the ground still heaved and rippled as if there was something alive underneath, trying to get out. Sometimes I thought I heard whispering voices, but I could never make out what they were saying. My status as a creature of the darkness was of no comfort to me here: I was afraid. Whatever had done this was far beyond anything I had encountered, and I knew that confronting something of such power would mean certain death. I had no idea what we were going to do, but at this point I had become very tired, as had my human comrade. We took shelter in the ruins of a small building, neither of us saying anything. It was all just too much to bear.
